This 1743 map shows western Africa from the territory of present-day Gabon in the south to Niger, Mali, and Mauritania in the north. The map was published in Nuremberg, Germany, by the firm of Homännische Erben, meaning the successors of the Nuremberg engraver and publisher Johann Baptist Homann (1663-1724) and his son, Johann Christoph Homann (1703-30). It is based on an earlier work by the great French mapmaker Jean Baptiste d’Anville (1697-1782). The illustration at the lower left depicts an African village. Items such as dress, houses and other ...

André Thevet (1516/17-92) was a Franciscan friar who traveled widely and, through his writings, helped to establish cosmographie--as geography was called at the time--as a science in 16th-century France. After making trips to Africa and the Middle East in the 1540s, he was appointed chaplain to the expedition of Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon, which set out from Le Havre in May 1555 to establish a colony in Brazil. The expedition landed near present-day Rio de Janeiro in November of the same year. In January 1556, Thevet fell ill ...